Rachel Feinstein's Fantasy Land

Rachel Feinstein is surrounded by power tools. We're standing in the noisy workshop of Perfection Electricks in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where Feinstein's sculptures for her latest exhibition, "Folly," in Manhattan's Madison Square Park, are being made, and all around us, buzz saws are whining, sparks are flying, and the sweet stink of sawdust is high in the air. Meanwhile, the art world's most glamorous woman bustles about in jeans and work boots—her magical peachy-blonde hair yanked back off her face, zero makeup—directing and inspecting and commenting and cajoling, happy as a fish in a river. "Isn't this place great?" she says in her husky, friendly voice. "I'm on the wait list to get a studio in this building. I love it here."

Jason Schmidt

It's funny seeing Feinstein like this. In public she's usually in Glamour Mode—sitting red-lipped and dolled up in the front row at Marc Jacobs, swanning down the runway at Tom Ford in a thousand pink ruffles, or starring in one of the famous gazillion-dollar paintings by her husband, John Currin—so it's easy to forget that there's a real fire-breathing artist under there. One whose recent installations at New York's Lever House and the Gagosian Gallery in Rome weren't so much art shows as full-throated one-woman operas—bold, theatrical, and wise. And today is all about Feinstein the Artist, the one who dreams big dreams, then rolls her sleeves up and gets down in the trenches and makes them real.

"We're in kind of a crazy rush right now because all the sculptures have to be ready for installation in a week," says the 43-year-old Feinstein with a chuckle. "I have no idea how we're going to get it all done." But she doesn't seem particularly worried; she is calm and focused, like a general who knows she's going to win the battle she's about to fight.

When finished, the three white powder–coated sculptures will consist of a fantastical airborne ship, a 26-foot-tall fairy-tale cottage perched atop a cliff, and a Rococo hut that recalls a child's playhouse. Inspired in part by sets from the Ballets Russes and working in a fanciful vein similar to the sets that Feinstein created for Marc Jacobs's Fall 2012 runway show, the works are a thrilling feat of trompe l'oeil. They look like oversize, 3-D paper sketches blown into the greenery of Madison Square Park by some brilliant, demented giant, but in fact they are sturdy as hell, made of solid metal and anchored in the ground with concealed concrete feet.

One could say the same about Feinstein herself. In person she seems fragile—her skin translucent as a peeled grape, her eyelashes long and matted like a

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pony's—but the minute she laughs, a brass marching band comes out. "I wanted the sculptures to be these things that made you feel playful," says Feinstein, who has a long-standing fascination with theater and ruins, which she traces back to her childhood amid the slapdash baroque McMansions of '80s Miami. "So the park is like a stage, and as you walk among the sculptures, you become like commedia dell'arte performers. I've always wanted to figure out a way to make my sculptures serve as props, and I think this was one way of doing that."

In a sense, though, Feinstein's whole life with Currin can be seen as a kind of cheeky performance art piece, complete with three golden-haired children (Francis, 10, Hollis, eight, and Flora, five), a five-story town house in Gramercy Park that's currently undergoing a massive renovation by the Italian masters at Studio Peregalli (all of the floors are being shipped in from various châteaus around Europe), and a spectacular plot of land in Orient, on Long Island's North Fork, where they plan to build a country house. "John says that we're like MC Hammer," Rachel says, laughing. "You know, he made, like, $500 million one year and blew it all on this crazy house, the Hammertime Mansion? We're like that. As soon as John started making money with Larry [Gagosian], we went and blew it all on houses."

"I only seem to do these gigantic operatic movements that are years in the making and culminate in these volcanic eruptions."

And presiding over this growing domain, of course, is Feinstein and her singular "casual baroque" style, which, she says frankly, is nonexistent in the daytime when she's working ("I just grab whatever is closest") but comes out in full force when she and Currin hit the town. "I wear a lot of Marc Jacobs, a lot of Tom Ford," says Feinstein, who is close friends with both designers and cheerfully admits to the "huge indulgence" of employing a stylist and a tailor who come over to the house with racks of clothing for her to shop from. "Marc recently sent over one of his incredible Victorian dresses in dark maroon purple with black lace—that's exactly my fantasy dress," she explains. "Anything with a kind of chaste sexuality I love."

Another favorite designer was Feinstein's good friend L'Wren Scott, whose suicide in March stunned the fashion community. "I still don't understand it—no one does," says Feinstein, who spoke at Scott's memorial. "It's a mystery." But, she continues, "the people I love are all people with crazy, dramatic personalities and who make work that's a reflection of their personality. It's true of Marc Jacobs and Tom Ford and John [Currin] and L'Wren. Every time you put on one of L'Wren's dresses, you felt like you were Catwoman. Like, I'm gonna go out and get my man."

Despite her hectic life, Feinstein is as determined to keep making art as she is to keep wearing those fabulous dresses. "The last few projects I've done were so enormous and ambitious," she muses. "I've never done, like, a drawing or a single piece for an art fair. I only seem to do these gigantic operatic movements that are years in the making and culminate in these volcanic eruptions." She smiles. "It seems insane, but I think it's because I'm not good at splitting up my mind between all the things in my life. When I make art I have to do something giant that takes up all my time, or else it just won't happen."

Feinstein's World

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The artist packs her life with modern and baroque treasures Jason Schmidt

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Rudolf Stingel "He gave us one of his pieces as a wedding present."

Courtesy Rudolf Stingel

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Rococo Hut, 2014 "Being from Miami, I have an ornate aesthetic, and I've embraced it."

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